Research Articles
Research Articles Explore cutting-edge research based on CompNet’s micro-aggregated firm-level data and related analytical tools. These articles cover empirical and theoretical…
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Alumni IWH provides guidance and support in job placement after graduation, including letters of recommendation and career advice. Graduates have found placements in academia…
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Visualization
Visualization Below you can see a first application of the data visualization created using the CompNet Reduced Dataset. On the top of the graphs, there is a filter called “select…
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Reports
Reports Flagship Firm Productivity Report 2023 Introducing the release of the 2023 Flagship Firm Productivity Report , providing critical insights into the short-term impact of…
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Compnet Training Program
CompNet Training Program Structure The course is made for autonomous online learning. It is structured in three modules : Beginners, Intermediate and Advanced. Each of them…
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Visualization
Visualization Below you can see a first application of the data visualization created using the CompNet Reduced Dataset. On the top of the graphs, there is a filter called “select…
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9th vintage
9th Vintage CompNet Dataset The CompNet dataset includes a set of micro-aggregated indicators to enhance policy and academic analysis on competitiveness and productivity. All the…
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Research Clusters
Three Research Clusters Each IWH research group is assigned to a topic-oriented research cluster. The clusters are not separate organisational units, but rather bundle the…
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Alumni
IWH Alumni The IWH maintains contact with its former employees worldwide. We involve our alumni in our work and keep them informed, for example, with a newsletter. We also plan…
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Essays on Firms and Market Performance
Tommaso Bighelli
PhD Thesis, db-thueringen,
2024
Abstract
In Chapter 1, I combine longitudinal administrative firm-level data from Germany with 8,000 local tax changes for identification to show that local tax hikes (cuts) increase (decrease) the local manufacturing share. Firm-level results reveal that this is due to wage, employment, firm entry, and labor productivity in the service sector being more responsive to a tax shock than in manufacturing. With this evidence in mind, I calibrate a two-sector model with heterogeneous firms and profit tax to show that, owing to different structural parameters, a corporate tax cut disproportionately benefits service firms, contributing to the sectoral reallocation from manufacturing to service. In Chapter 2, we derive a European Herfindahl-Hirschman concentration index from 15 micro-aggregated country datasets. We show that European concentration rose due to a reallocation of economic activity towards large and concentrated industries. Over the same period, productivity gains from an increasing allocative efficiency of the European market accounted for 50% of European productivity growth while markups stayed constant. Using country-industry variation, we show that changes in concentration are positively associated with changes in productivity and allocative efficiency. This holds across most sectors and countries and supports the notion that rising concentration in Europe reflects a more efficient market environment rather than weak competition and rising market power. In chapter 3, We study the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic and related policy support on productivity. We employ an extensive micro-distributed exercise to access otherwise unavailable individual data on firm performance and government subsidies. Our cross-country evidence for five EU countries shows that the pandemic led to a significant short-term decline in aggregate productivity and the direct support to firms had only a limited positive effect on productivity developments.
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